1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a financial information intermediary system, and more particularly, to a financial information intermediary system that supplies clients with a collection of on-line information on financial products that suit their needs and preferences, by selecting out of a variety of products available from a plurality of financial institutions.
2. Description of the Related Art
The popularization of commercial online services and the exploding use of the Internet in recent years have caused a significant change in the existing online commerce systems in terms of their structures and functions. There are a numerous pieces of product information available online for browsing purposes, and consumers can select the desired products that suit their taste and make online purchases. Today, many financial products supplied by banks and other financial institutions are also accessible to the clients in the same way, which services are called online banking services. In general, financial products include a wide variety of derivatives that may look similar but different in reality. Furthermore, a number of new products have been introduced to the market from many companies including foreign firms, since overall government controls are loosened by deregulation of financial systems. Consumers search the online information by themselves to make the best choice.
Home banking systems are known as typical online commerce systems, which will allow the clients to electronically access to their individual bank accounts by connecting their home terminals to a central computer of the bank. Clients can enjoy various banking services such as transaction summary review and online fund transfer.
There are some proprietary networks shared by various financial institutions such as banks, securities firms, and insurance companies, which allow their clients to use more sophisticated, combined services. Such financial networks may further be linked to another online system that connects between credit card issuers and merchants, which is used, for example, by the merchants to make inquiries about maximum lending limits for their clients. This kind of internetworking facilitates credit card operations including testing of creditworthiness and fund transfer transactions that must occur as a consequence of credit sales.
As for the conventional facilities for consumers, many financial institutions issue general-purpose cards to their clients, providing them with a unified means for purchasing products or services, using automatic teller machines and automatic fund transfer machines, as well as for executing other transactions related to credit, debit, coupons, and the like. With a dedicated transaction terminal using a home television set as a display device, home banking users can perform online payment for any charged purchases being billed from credit card offices, telephone companies, and others. To enjoy such online services, clients are required to establish an account of their own for use in fund transfer operations. Clients can request a new account by sending a request message over the network.
As outlined above, a wide variety of financial products and services are available in today's online market, and their online catalog data is potentially open to all interested consumers. However, the volume and the variety of such online data are too enormous for them to screen out unnecessary information and reach the desired products or services. In fact, consumers only make access to a limited range of product and service information provided by a few financial institutions with which they have some established connections.
In many conventional systems, the business relationships between consumers and financial institutions are established on an individual basis. This situation makes it inconvenient for individual consumers to manage their personal finance, because they are unable to summarize all distributed accounts and assets in a timely manner.